Uncovering Appalachia’s Hidden Heroines: Pauletta Hansel Reveals Untold Stories in Understory
Interviewed by Leslie Lindsay
It was Halloween the day I received Pauletta Hansel, poet laureate emeritus of Cincinnati’s newest book, Understory: A Women’s History of Appalachia (University of Kentucky Press; Oct. 2026), which seems fitting for a book about ancestors.
As I sat on my front porch in suburban Chicago, handing out candy to children dressed as dinosaurs, fairies, and ghosts, I read snippets of Understory. I saw the tiny feet traipsing across the ground, faces smiling, pumpkin buckets swinging, and as macabre as it sounds, I thought of them 150 years from now, how Indigenous communities are often thinking seven generations into the future. Only Pauletta is looking at fourteen generations in the past and 400 years of women ancestors.
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